It is perhaps worth noting that – as far as I am aware – this is one of the few training events that focus on social media and social networks for ‘Personal Knowledge Management‘ as opposed to the many and varied events on social media for communications and marketing. Yes, we’ll cover the elements of communications and marketing, but from the perspective of personal engagement strategies and managing relationships, rather than from a corporate perspective.

A definition of Personal knowledge management (PKM)

Refers to a collection of processes that an individual carries out to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his/her daily activities and how these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning and represents a bottom-up approach to knowledge management, as opposed to more traditional, top-down KM . Source:Wikipedia

To quote myself from the course synopsis:

“…..It is not widely recognised that collaboration and knowledge sharing are skills and practices that rarely get taught. It’s something we may learn on the job in a hit or miss fashion. Some people are natural at it. Others struggle to understand it. This one day course provides a practical and detailed introduction to social media and social/professional networks that will enable delegates to have a greater understanding of their context for use and deployment within their organisation and for personal and professional development”

Specific topics covered in the training include:

Overview of the social web

Risks and rewards in the use of social media

Creating and maintaining your personal profile

Social media tools and their context for knowledge sharing

Listening and observing; an introduction to aggregation, sentiment and tracking tools

Communities of Interest/Practice for personal and professional development

Practical exercises and examples of Social Media in action

Building a personalised collaboration toolkit

I have created a general web resource for material used on the training – which is a moving feast, given the rapidly changing environment – and maintain a Diigo social bookmarking group for collecting useful links to social media, social business and social networking resources (feel free to join and contribute !).

The course notes are proprietary, and hence not available from the social media toolkit link, but to give a visual flavour of the content I’ve run the notes through Wordle – which is the image shown at the start of this blog. Click to enlarge.

Please contact me if you are interested in the training or just need more information.

Stephen is Director and founder of Collabor8now Ltd, an organization focussed on developing collaborative environments (e.g. Communities of Practice) and the integration of knowledge management tools and processes to support business improvement. He is a certified knowledge manager with the Knowledge Management Institute (KMI) and the author of several published research papers on collaborative behaviours and information technology.